Tag Archives: Ned Trek

Usual Rubbish

Losing wheels.

Are you sure it’s July? Absolutely sure? How is that even possible? All right, Jesus. Where did the freaking Spring go? No, no … not THAT spring. I meant the SEASON spring! God almighty.

Yes, here we are … three months after posting the last episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, and we’re still short of posting the next episode. Sure, it’s summer, but this is about wading in the water at the nearest beach resort. God, no! This is about the wheels coming off. This is about a leak in the hull. This is about a seized engine, smoke drifting lazily skyward from its molten husk. (Do engines have husks? Well .. ours does.) This is about production delays that are not voluntary, but ultimately necessary.

Brother Matt is our show editor. I think it’s common knowledge that he has been caught up with fledgling Peregrine Falcons for the past three months in particular. Aside from that, his computer imploded, taking many of his work files with it. Not a good circumstance, as you can well understand. I mean, think about it – how the hell are you supposed to complete a Star Trek parody like Ned Trek without the requisite ship sounds, particularly when it’s an audio podcast? The audience has few enough cues to work with, in that there are no visuals and we are lousy actors. (Though strangely that last bit doesn’t stop us from trying to get our point across.)

Sheesh. When things go wrong ... I know what some of you are probably thinking. I know because Mitch Macaphee has built a special mind-reading device that reveals the inner thoughts of anyone who so much as glances at this blog post. So … I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING … and aside from all of that stuff about Donald Trump’s white baseball cap, I totally agree with you. That said, some of you probably assume that the reason we do Ned Trek is just to provide a vehicle for distributing new songs. There’s some truth to that. We are not tremendously introspective here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, to be honest – a lot of the time, we’re just running on enzymes. Knee-jerk creatives, that’s us.

So hey … don’t give up on THIS IS BIG GREEN. We will be posting someday soon. In the meantime, amuse yourself with classic episodes of Ned Trek at www.nedtrek.com. Lotta laughs there.

Usual Rubbish

Ned-scapades.

Step one: fill the little box with letters. It’s a letter box! Step two, check your work on step one. Step three: press “publish” and watch the blue smoke come out. You are now a “blogger”, Charlie! All you need now are decipherable opinions.

Well, here we are at the mill, still waiting for the next episode of our Podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN to roll off the back of a truck. Late again. Must be short on key ingredient this month. Actually, as I pointed out last week, the main ingredient is work on our parts, which is rare indeed. A jem of great price … that price being the sweat off of our collective brows. Work, work, work … that’s what a podcast is all about. The internet is a slave-driver! Small wonder we chose to outsource its production to some nameless third world country. Working through a social media broker, we have been assured of a good and reliable product, voiced by people who sound exactly like Matt and I, their Indonesian accents just barely detectable … (Oh, what a giveaway!)

Looking forward to hearing how they handle the Ned Trek episode. This one was a challenge – another musical, no less. There are six … maybe seven songs included in the script, all brand new production. Those poor folks in Jakarta have their work cut out for them. (And yes, I’m sure you’ve guessed that our “brokers” are actually our old corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, also known as Hegephonic. They’ve likely got sweatshops on four continents toiling 24/7 to pump out this episode.)

That's the stuff.What have we been doing with all of our free time? Thought you might want to know. Actually, Matt’s been chasing Peregrine falcons around downtown Utica, like the very good fellow he is.  (You can check on his efforts – and even contribute to them, if you like – on the Utica Peregrine Falcon site.) My efforts have been of a more pedestrian nature, actually. I spent the last few weeks working on our new Ned Trek site, posting a few episodes extracted from our podcast, and making it look as ridiculous as possible. Here it is, mobile-ready and set to roll: www.nedtrek.com

So … yeah, that happened. What’s up with you? Let me know. You know how I worry.

Usual Rubbish

Song mill.

What the hell. Is that the number of songs? Are you freaking kidding me? Just looking at it is freaking exhausting. All those parts! What the …. !

Forgot that.Oh, hello. I’m pretending to just notice you, there on the other side of this transparent screen that separates us. Hoo-boy, well … you’ve caught us in the middle of an analysis of our song inventory. Little hard to keep close track of this stuff. We just write ’em, track ’em, and stack ’em. Never take the time to count them, for chrissake. Before you know it, they’re cluttering up the closets, over-stuffing all of the dresser drawers, spilling out into the hallway, and god knows what. Bloody nuisance!

So, on Matt’s insistence (slave driver!), we’ve taken to inventorying them, starting with the most recent examples and working backward. What’s first? Well, our Ned Trek songs, of course. Stacks of them. Our February episode of Ned Trek included no less than six new songs, including a number by Mr. Sulu himself: “Two Lines”. It’s a kind of Sulu-esque lament about the crappy little speeches he was given in the original Star Trek series, typically … well … two lines long. Appropriately, the chorus is made up of two-line parts George Takei uttered at various points in his tenure as navigator on the Enterprise:

Captain, the controls are frozen
the helm won’t respond; we’re being pulled inside
Aye, aye, my career is broken
like a giant hand has me in its hold

Captain, the controls are frozen
manual override is completely out
Aye, sir, I’ve been trying
but my shields are down and I cannot last

That’s about the size of it. So there’s maybe forty of these now recorded and mixed. We’ve got another six in the oven for the next episode of Ned Trek. One of the more productive periods of songwriting in Big Green history, not that quantity is any substitute for quality. Still, we like to think that, in counting them, we are at least handling the quantity part of the issue. Or maybe we’ve just got way too much time on our hands.